Present a rebuttal against the findings in the case study below using the PMI Ethics codes

Ethics Case 1: Tomiko's Dilemma

It is early Friday afternoon, and Tomiko is taking a few minutes to reflect on the past two weeks. The CEO has asked her to provide an update on the Neptune Project at 4 PM. The Neptune Project is the highest priority project for Universal, Inc., and was led by Paul. Universal's CEO mentions the Neptune Project at every Town Hall meeting and how important it is for Universal's strategic success. At the monthly project managers meetings, where the project managers highlight their current assignments, Paul also talked about all the great things happening on the project. He had a great team that is working well together, plus the project is on track to be completed on time and on budget and will meet all its objectives. In fact, Paul had been sharing some of the more interesting information that has been discovered by the project team, such as some personal information about Universal's clients. Paul is an experienced Project Manager and received his PMP ten years ago. It was late Thursday afternoon last week when the CEO came to Tomiko and asked if she would like to be the project manager for the Neptune Project.

Paul had just submitted his resignation that Thursday morning. Tomiko heard through the office grapevine later that he had accepted a really great job with one of their suppliers, ACME. ACME was also working on the Neptune Project, so Paul and senior management thought it best for him to leave Universal immediately. Tomiko was very surprised by the offer from the CEO. Her recent project had gone very well and was just wrapping up, so the timing was perfect, but Tomiko's last project was a lot smaller than the Neptune Project and certainly had a lower profile. However, the CEO was very insistent that Tomiko was the best choice to replace Paul and noted this change would be effective Friday, the very next day. Last Friday, Tomiko met the team and got access to all the project documents. For much of the weekend, she reviewed these and was shocked at what she found. The project documentation was very poorly organized, and certainly was not following any of Universal's standards. As

Tomiko tried to make sense of the documentation, it appeared that the project was not doing well at all, but this would have to be checked out and verified. One concerning issue that Tomiko did find, were copies of signed confidentiality agreements where project team members agreed they would not share any personal information used or made available from working on the project. Tomiko noted that she would need to talk to Universal's HR team about signing the confidentiality agreement herself. She also wondered why Paul was sharing some of this personal information at meetings, especially since these confidentiality agreements were already in place. On Monday, Tomiko set up a series of meetings with each of the four project teams. The initial meetings were very polite. The teams were obviously still processing Paul's sudden departure. But during discussions, Tomiko got some indications that her initial findings from the weekend were correct; the project was in serious trouble. On Wednesday, the CFO marched into Tomiko's office demanding to know about the 20 invoices that Paul had sent over for payment before he left. The CFO told Tomiko that the project was already over budget and these invoices were going to put the Neptune Project even further over budget. The CFO wanted to ensure that the invoices were correct and also wanted to understand what was being done to correct overspending on the project. Yes, the CFO understood the Neptune Project was very important to Universal, but he also pointed out it could not be executed without financial controls. Given the project's importance, Tomiko knew that being over budget might not be a problem. It all depended on what could be earned back. Having said that, some of the documents she found seemed to indicate that the CPI was below 1. However, in the status reports that Paul created and sent out, the cost status was always documented in the green. Over the course of the week, Tomiko had follow-up meetings with the four teams, and she was able to verify that the project was running late and there were quality issues with some of the deliverables.

During these team meetings, there seemed to be a number of unplanned activities happening. She discovered that the risk log only had a few risks identified and no one knew about it. Also, she found that there were a large number of change requests that were still outstanding, and these had not been assessed, approved or even rejected. Tomiko spent additional time investigating the invoices the CFO gave her. She was having trouble finding a work package associated with each of these invoices, and she also noticed that the largest invoices were from ACME. By the end of the week, Tomiko had seen enough and filed an ethics violation with PMI.